21 Nov 2009

BayernLB: State-owned Banks no solution

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The sorry state of Bayern LB demonstrates that public ownership of banks is no solution to the problem posed by banking supervision. While...
20 Nov 2009

Democracy and Bank Bailouts

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The lack of democratic control is an all-pervasive defect of modern societies. More and more decisions are made by technocrats and a politic...
19 Nov 2009

London: hellbent on destruction

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Not enough that the town is still - despite the collapsing Pound Sterling - expensive, that public transport may not get better in a time sp...
18 Nov 2009

Patent for Investment Methods

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News that Research Affiliates has been granted a US patent for an indexing methodology that selects and weights securities using fundamenta...
4 Nov 2009

Windfall Profits Tax - arbitrary and discriminatory

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Some Commentators are toying with the idea of imposing a windfall profits tax on British Banks. We are not trying to defend what some may co...
2 Nov 2009

EU competition policy arbitrary

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When a major bank states that the EU may force 'unforeseen' asset sales alarm bells should be ringing. We have repeatedly stated on ...
1 Nov 2009

Ostentatious Consumption - good or bad?

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Goldman Sachs' Lloyd Blankfein has asked his employees to avoid being seen as big spenders. The jury is out whether this is just a cos...
25 Oct 2009

Breaking up big banks? There is a middle-way

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A middle way to safeguard the utility component of banking and isolate the riskier parts of the business would be to require all investment ...
21 Oct 2009

New Credit Suisse compensation structure

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It remains to be seen how the growing complexity of compensation schemes such as the one published by Credit Suisse will affect the abilit...
19 Oct 2009

Mayor Boris still does not get it!

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One nearly has to feel sorry for Goldman Sachs - though I would hazard a guess that the people there would not give a fig for our sympathy....